September 15. Night. Cycle 9’s final day.
The rain had stopped hours ago, leaving a clean sky and a hard, bright moon.
In Rhine’s house in Windrest’s Outer City, the room was lit only by moonlight.
Against the wall sat the architect of the player-world’s blood-ritual disaster—2121-0776.
Magic bound him in place. A silencing spell sealed his mouth.
He stared up at Rhine with furious, terrified eyes, jaw working as he tried to shout through the spell. No sound came out.
Across from him stood Rhine, Haizan, and Delanna.
A few minutes earlier, Haizan had asked how the captive should be handled. The question had turned Player 0776’s fear into panic.
It had also made Delanna quietly excited.
In her mind, travelers were “kin.” They came from the same elsewhere. They shared instincts, gossip, and a strange unity that locals didn’t understand.
Delanna had dealt with travelers for a long time. She knew they had a peculiar method of communication.
When a traveler performed an exceptional deed, the story spread on its own—whispered into every traveler’s awareness without messenger or letter.
Delanna thought it was fascinating. Useful, too. A way for travelers to identify leaders and threats.
So when Haizan asked how to “dispose” of Player 0776, Delanna waited with a smug certainty.
Killing a villain was a great way to build fame.
Rhine would take the shot himself.
Rhine went quiet for a heartbeat, gaze distant as if weighing invisible costs. Under the moonlight, his profile looked calm enough to make Delanna’s confidence swell.
He spoke.
“Don’t keep him,” Rhine said softly.
Delanna smiled—until she realized what he meant.
Rhine tilted his chin toward Haizan.
An order.
Delanna’s smile froze.
You want a godhead, she thought, stunned. You’re not a man who chooses mediocrity. So why would you throw away the easiest spotlight?
She didn’t understand him.
Rhine, meanwhile, had already done the math.
Flint was Level 5 now. If he used it to personally execute Player 0776, he’d gain a sliver of fusion progress—small, but real.
But Player 0776 wasn’t just any criminal.
He was the one who’d triggered the blood-ritual incident in the player-world and nearly thrown the whole planet into chaos. The official travelers were hunting him across both worlds.
They had leads. They were watching.
Only days earlier, an official traveler—Player 0097—had posted in the chat that 2121-0776 had fled to the sea.
And that was true.
If Rhine killed him with Flint, there was a real chance the System would announce it.
An announcement would tell every traveler something important: where the kill happened, or at least enough clues to narrow it down.
It would also invite official travelers to triangulate Rhine’s island.
And for what?
A tiny bit of fusion progress he no longer needed.
Rhine had Quest 1—Find and obtain the Fate Sea Chart. Clear it, and he’d advance an entire tier in one step.
Compared to that, a few percent of weapon progression wasn’t worth the attention.
He didn’t want trouble tied to his name… or to the number behind it.
So he let Haizan do it.
In the thin moonlight, Haizan obeyed. As a Tier 4 Rank 9 Dreamwarden, he didn’t need effort to crush a soul.
Player 0776’s body jerked once.
Went slack.
Haizan turned to call for a troll warrior to remove the corpse.
That was when the problem began.
Gray-black liquid seeped out of the corpse’s eyes, nose, ears, mouth—then out through pores across the skin.
It stank like sour metal and rotting algae.
And it burned.
The liquid ate through clothes, hair, flesh. It pooled on the floorboards and hissed, corrosion spreading in wet blooms.
Within moments, the body had been dissolved entirely, leaving only a spreading puddle of tar-thick slime that continued to generate more of the same corrosive fluid.
Haizan frowned hard. The source was gone, yet the liquid kept coming—as if the puddle itself was breeding.
He cast binding spells to stop it from flowing into the rest of the house. The magic held, but it didn’t solve the real issue.
The puddle kept producing more.
“What is this?” Haizan demanded, turning to Rhine.
Rhine didn’t know.
Delanna, who’d been too busy processing Rhine’s choice to pay attention, snapped back to the moment with a soft gasp.
“Oh. That’s my fault,” she said, moving quickly to the window. She opened it, letting cool early-autumn air spill in. “I forgot.”
She held Mirror of Honesty up toward the moon.
Moonlight gathered as if pulled by invisible hands, winding into the mirror’s surface until the glass shone like a tiny captured moon.
Delanna tilted her wrist and poured that moonlight down onto the puddle.
Light touched the gray-black liquid.
A bright radiance flared. The sludge shuddered, hissed, and began to thin—like grime being scrubbed away by holy water.
Within seconds, the corrosive mess was purified into harmless moisture that evaporated into nothing.
Delanna lowered the mirror, looking almost pleased with herself.
“That traveler was blessed by the Mother of Gargoyles,” she said lightly, as if explaining an inconvenient stain. “He carried something ill-omened. Even dead, he wanted to poison the world.”
Haizan looked unsettled. Rhine just watched the last shimmer fade.
…
Delanna followed Rhine into his study at once.
“Well?” she pressed. “You saw it. You proved it. Now you can be honest with me.”
Rhine didn’t bother pretending he cared about the puddle anymore.
“Where is the godhead?” he asked.
Delanna blinked. She’d expected awe. Reflection. A long speech. Travelers loved drama, didn’t they?
Instead, Rhine went straight for the target.
She smoothed a curl of hair back into place, reclaiming a little control. “Before that—answer me something.”
Rhine waited.
“Why didn’t you kill him yourself?” Delanna asked. “I know how travelers work. Deeds spread. You threw away a chance to build your name.”
Rhine’s eyes narrowed slightly.
So she knew the System’s announcements existed. She knew the chat. More than she’d ever admitted.
“Because I don’t want an announcement,” Rhine said bluntly. “And I don’t want official travelers guessing my island.”
Delanna’s brows lifted, impressed despite herself.
Rhine didn’t add: and I don’t need the scraps of weapon progress.
He’d already done the calculation. Enough said.
Delanna studied him for a moment, then her expression shifted—curiosity turning into decision.
Maybe helping this traveler obtain a godhead would be… correct.
And certainly interesting.
So she stopped holding back.
She told him what she knew.
Delanna had been trapped in the sunken Sorrow Theater for years, but her people hadn’t abandoned her. They couldn’t rescue her, not with the theater sealed the way it was.
But they could bring her news.
They spoke through secret channels. Through old songs. Through gifts carried by trusted fins.
And through those messages, Delanna knew exactly where the other half of the godhead had gone.
“It was taken,” she said.
Rhine’s stomach dropped. “Taken where?”
Delanna met his eyes. “To another world.”
Rhine’s mind stalled for a breath. “You mean… the player-world.”
“Yes,” Delanna said, and her tone sharpened with old hatred. “We hate the Seven Gods. We don’t want them to claim the Creator’s godhead. But their worshippers are everywhere in the Endless Sea. We couldn’t keep it safe here.”
“So you sent it away,” Rhine said slowly.
“We did,” Delanna confirmed. “But don’t overestimate merfolk. We are the Creator’s believers, not the Creator’s chosen travelers.”
She held up a finger. “We could only move that half of the godhead to another world because of a traveler.”
Twenty years ago, in the height of midsummer, merfolk surfaced near a lonely island and lured a ship’s crew—as they always did when they wanted bloodlines.
But among those sailors was a widower.
A man who, even under enchantment, clung to the memory of his dead wife and the fear for his daughter’s future.
The merfolk found it strange. More than strange.
When they examined him, they realized what he truly was.
A traveler.
Instead of draining him dry, the merfolk kept him awake and spoke with him openly.
From that conversation they learned his Creator-gift: limited foresight and divination.
It was restricted—but it was real.
The widower knew how valuable that was. So he used it at once to divine his daughter’s fate.
And the result shattered him.
Years later, his only child would be chosen as a traveler and dragged into the Endless Sea.
Her origin would be low. Her fate would be miserable.
In this brutal world, she would be one bad day away from death—or worse.
The widower believed he couldn’t change that future alone. His own start in the Endless Sea had been terrible; he knew his limits.
So he bargained.
He offered the merfolk something precious.
In exchange, he begged them to protect his daughter’s future.
And the thing he carried away—back across the boundary between worlds—was the half godhead Delanna’s people had extracted from what used to be a full continent… and what was now Storm Island.
Rhine listened under the gas lamp, silent.
But as Delanna spoke, the pieces began aligning in his head with an old memory he’d never questioned hard enough.
A man he knew. A father.
Huang Yanyan’s father.
Rhine remembered it too clearly: the midnight death. The doctor calling it a sudden brain hemorrhage.
He remembered Yanyan becoming a traveler almost twenty years later.
He remembered Yanyan’s mother dying in a sudden “accident” that had never sat right.
And he remembered the coral card deck.
He’d found it in Yanyan’s house. Red coral. Merfolk imagery carved into the surface. Patterns that matched Delanna’s kind.
Yanyan had acted like she’d never seen it before.
So who brought it into the player-world?
Rhine’s hands moved with slow certainty.
From his System inventory, he took out the photographs he’d snapped of the coral deck last cycle—high-resolution prints on glossy paper.
He held them out to Delanna.
“Is this what the traveler took?” he asked quietly. “Is this the thing that was carried into our world?”